1. Field of the Invention
In embodiments, there is disclosed a dialog manager configured to use knowledge from previous dialog turns to reduce the probability of misunderstandings in subsequent turns.
2. Background
Spoken computer-dialog systems in which a human caller is talking to a computer (e.g., through a telephone or other audio enabled device) are known. In such systems the computer is able to generate speech output, either as synthesized or prerecorded speech or a mixture of the two. The system may further feature an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine, which analyzes sound data digitized from a caller's utterances. The ASR engine generates a speech recognition result which contains an ordered list of alternative interpretations. Each interpretation consists of one or more information items. The speech recognition result is then passed to a dialog manager for further analysis, at the end of which the dialog manager generates a textual output suitable for speech output generation.
An automatic speech recognizes can produce inaccurate results, especially for utterances that are acoustically similar. Usually, the dialog manager at some point in the conversation will generate a so-called confirmation question, which asks the caller to confirm or reject the information collected so far. If a misunderstanding occurs, the user is often prompted to repeat the information. During this repeated recognition turn, there is a high probability that the same mistake will occur again. This will give the caller an annoying experience.